It Gets Better
by Iniquitus goes Death
Summary: An entry to The Trevor Project's 'It Gets Better' video series by Sakurazaki Setsuna.  Features notes and a message from the author.


**It Gets Better**

The video loads, and a young woman sits kneeling in what looks like a dorm room, looking at the camera. She blinks, and bows her head quickly as she notices that the 'recording' light is blinking before beginning to talk.

"H-hi! Uh. My name is Setsuna, " she begins, almost visibly struggling to remember what she was supposed to say.

A brief flicker runs across the screen and now the shadow on the wall is placed differently, displaying the reset.

"I first notiecd that something was different about myself when I came to high school, following a friend. I noticed almost immediately that none of the other girls followed their friends around like I did, and I began wondering what the difference was between me and them."

"It was... hard for me, since I'm not much of a social person, but I eventually asked someone from a different class for what reasons you might follow someone and keep guard outside their door for."

The girl bites her lip. "When she... she said that the only reason she'd do something like that was if that person was worth more to her than herself. The exact examples she gave were 'like a family member or a boyfriend'."

"I excused myself almost immediately, ran back to my room and spent a good part of my day staring at the wall, just wondering which of the two it was." The screen flickers again, and now she fidgets. "I even called my friend's father, who'd taken me in when I was very little, and asked him if maybe I was related to her, and if that was why I cared so much about her safety."

"As you can _probably_ guess, he said no, and I...collapsed."

"I hid myself away even more, keeping away from school events and even class meetings in the fear that people knew what it was that I was—" She breaks off, staring into the middle distance. "Come to think of it, calling myself an 'it' didn't help. But, uh, anyway, I shut myself off from every person I thought knew what I was, and the fact that I kept on stalking my friend despite hating myself for it meant that sooner or later I suspected everyone."

"That was..." She breaks off, looking troubled. "I still remember when my facade came crashing down. School trips always tend to be the trigger for this stuff, I notice. While on the trip, I met someone. Someone who would — later on, but looking back I notice the signs were there — hurt me very badly." The girl stares into the camera, and her fist twitches just a little. "Physically... and sexually. I hated myself for being weaker than her and for submitting."

"I spent that part of my life around a lot of very high places, and shortly after I met her again, I spent an hour just staring out and..." She chuckles darkly, looking away from the camera. "Telling myself all the reasons why I shouldn't lean forward and try to forget."

The camera skips again. "It was stupid and childish, and I'm the luckiest girl that I know because my friends, classmates and teacher were all there to support me and help me face her down once and for all. I think... I think they knew more about me than I did myself, and I—" She stops, clamping a hand over her mouth as she begins blinking faster and the corners of her eyes start glimmering with tears.

"I-I'm sorry. I..." She takes a deep breath, fists curled on her knees and voice shaking. "Not too long after that, I followed my friend to a fair and tried to forget all about it. A-and she—" She breaks off again, shaking visibly and tears leaking down her cheeks. "I finally decided that I would stop hiding and face up to everything."

"You know, my friends are a cheerful bunch, and sometimes... sometimes, they act in ways that make me look at them and wonder if they're not... the same as me, to a degree. It's a stupid thought and I'm a stupid girl, but that made it, in a way, harder for me to accept myself. I thought that maybe I'd just been like them in the past and had long since forgotten it was just teasing."

She stops again, and breathes in and out shakily for a minute. "I-I-I... One that day, in a quiet little corner of the world where I could just hide away for the rest of time if she hated me, I stood there and admitted it to myself, to her and to the world at large that I was g-gay, and in love with her—"

The girl is fighting to continue, shuddering shoulders showing her determination to keep talking. "A-and that's when she leaned forward and k-kissed me." The girl again stops, breathing in and out and smiling happily under her tears of relief. "And all I can remember going through my head at that point in time is that I could have never felt a happy as I did on that moment if, back on the cliff, I had leaned forward."

"You should respect yourself, and respect who you are and what you feel, always. If people treat you badly because of that — leave. Call everyone who you think cares, and you'll find that all of them will. They care about you and love you just the way you are. The world is worth living in, and it gets so much better."

She falls silent once more, wiping the tears of memory away and digging in her pocket for something. "Th-that was three years ago. Now, the world is a much better place and I'm lucky enough to be a member of a group who's making it even better. I've made friends and learned so much about myself and everyone around me that I never once regret stepping back. I've been threatened and in mortal danger, and I still think that lookin away from the cliff edge took the most courage of everything I've done."

"But then, that may not be true." Her hand comes up, holding a tiny felt box for the camera to see. "T-today, I'm going on a d-date with my girlfriend of three years. We've been through hard times and we've fought, but I still love her just as much as I did back then — more, if anything, because I've come to appreciate just how wonderful and strong a person she really is. And more than anything else in the world, even if it seems a little selfish, I want to spend the rest of my life with her."

She opens the box to reveal a small golden band. "I-I'm going to take her to every one of our favourite shops, take her out to a restaurant, slowly walk back to the World Tree where we'll be all alone. I'm going to go on my knees, look her a straight in the eyes as I can, and I'm going to ask her to marry me."

The girl chokes for a moment, breathing in and out deeply to calm herself, the tears starting again. "I'm still scared that this is all just a dream, and that doing this will break the facade, but I-I'm willing to try and test that and my luck. The reason I think it's all a dream is because once I stepped away from the edge and realised that people cared about me, gay or straight, it all got so much better."

She smiles, and it's radiant and happy. "I c-can't promise you that it will all be good — I've fought with her and argued — but I can say that it gets better. It gets better. So, so much better, " she finishes, and chokes back a sob.

From offscreen, a cheerful voice says something that the distance to the microphone makes inaudible, though it sounds like a question from the inflection. The girl jerks her head up and says "Be right there!"

She turns back and leans closer, touching her lips to the small ring once for courage. "Please don't throw your life away. Please don't say to yourself that it's not worth it. You're all so much stronger than you think you are, and the worst thing I can imagine is all of you beautiful people not having the chance to grow up and seeing that I'm telling the truth for yourselves."

She leans in, hand going up to end the recording, smiling as radiantly as you can imagine.

"It gets better."

* * *

><p><strong>AN**: This story was inspired belatedly by the 'It Gets Better' videos multiple famous people created and posted on various sites to send the message of, well, 'it gets better' to young people who feel left out and suicidal. The push was aimed at lesbian, gay, bisexual, intersex, transgender and other teens with non-heterosexual self-identities, but it did not discriminate between the target groups and other depressed teenagers. It was designed to advise teenagers with suicidal urges to not act on those urges, for whatever reason they had at that time, telling them that things will change for the better, that they are not alone and that people care about them and accept them for what they are.

I wrote this story because I considered suicide multiple times during the times when I was still pinning down what I was and where I lie on the scale of sexuality. It took me three years of lasting through insults, bullying and mocking to come out the other side of that hell and say to myself 'I am bisexual, and there is nothing wrong with that'. I eventually came out to my family (who doesn't care about my orientation, believing it to be my business and well done them), my closer friends at school who didn't join in the teasing (and who supported me and accepted me wholeheartedly) and eventually the community at large, including my school (there were still a few idiots left, but they were by far in the minority).

I discovered that, fundamentally, unless something is very very wrong with them and they have no respect whatsoever for a person's feelings and mental state, the average person will accept any person of any race or sexuality and welcome them to the human race as a fellow competitor. In the two years since my coming out, the matter of my sexuality has long since dropped off the radar (because I'm not exactly good at romance and restrict myself to dirty jokes and knowing nods). The occasional person who bad-mouths me still pops up, but, by and large, the people who I care about have proven that they will stick with me if I relapse into depression due to paranoia.

I'm telling you all this because there is the chance that one of you - the people reading this 'story' - is feeling depressed and downcast. The next paragraph is directed to you:

It gets so much better. You will grow and become things you had never dreamed of being - I'm still growing and learning and becoming myself, but the world changed for the better once I acknowledged who I was and what I felt. And the cruelest thing in this world that I can imagine is that you lose the chance to see how beautiful the world is and how much you will change it for the better. If you ever worry, or need someone to talk to, please send me a message on this site or over at TV Tropes, and I will listen and reply. I check my inbox regularly on both sites. Take it from someone who spent three years being called a 'Nazi fag': it does get better. I can help you.

To all the people who notice that someone about you is feeling down; talk to them more. Let them know that you care. You can save a life, even just by listening.

I want to change things, to make equality really across-the-board (or as much as it is possible considering human nature) and widespread. It remains to be seen how three more years of cynical university education and struggling for a job will change it, so this story is as much a reminder of what I want to happen as it is a message of encouragement and hope by a fictional character.

I hope each and every one of you find your Konoka, your friend who you love or care for and who loves you or cares for you right back. Except if you don't want romance or a sexual relationship, in which case I wish for a friend who you can rely on and lean on for the rest of your life. Obviously.

**Story Notes (S/N)**: To make this story make more sense, consider this story to have taken pace in a _Negima!_ canon where sexuality and orientation are topics which are addressed more frequently and called into question far more. Nothing really changes, except (obviously) Setsuna suffering more internally due to her crush on Konoka. I don't really care about my writing being subpar - it just needs to be good enough to get the message across.

(...Okay, so maybe I just needed to write something heartwarming to prevent episode 8 of _Madoka_ turning me homi-suicidal again. The message still stands.) I am here for you.


End file.
